18th Sunday Year B - Homily 5

 Homily 5 - 2021

In today’s passage from the Gospel of John, Jesus urged his hearers to “work for food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering you.”

In their desire for further clarity, they asked Jesus what working for the food that endures to eternal life might involve, or, as they put it themselves, what they should do in practice “to do the works that God wanted”. That seemed near enough for Jesus, so he answered, “This is working for God: you must believe in the one he has sent” — namely in Jesus himself.

Not expecting that answer from Jesus, they asked for reassurance, “What sign will you give to show us that we should believe in you? What work will you do?” And for good measure, they suggested that Jesus do something like what happened twelve centuries earlier when, while Moses was leading the Jewish People to freedom from their bitter enslavement in Egypt, “their Fathers had manna to eat in the desert.” And they quoted Psalm 78 for good measure, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”

To clarify any confusion on their part, Jesus remarked that “It was not Moses who gave you bread from heaven.” And to make it totally clear who was at work among them now [forget about twelve centuries ago!], Jesus added, “It is my Father who gives you the bread from heaven, the true bread; for the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world”. [All present tense!] Not surprisingly, they asked, “Sir, give us that bread always”.

And then Jesus took things a step further - and dropped the bombshell! He said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never thirst”. That “whoever” includes us as well.

Why John wrote his Gospel was precisely to invite us to check it all out — not simply to take him at his word, but to to check out what he wrote against our own personal experience of Jesus in our lives.

“This is working for God: you must believe in the one he has sent”. Somehow, the quality of our faith transforms us — as food does. What is food that endures to eternal life like? How would you describe your experience of it to yourself? Never hunger? Never thirst? How long have you had to feel your way into that? And how would you put it into words now?

John’s Gospel will continue to challenge us over the next few weeks. And though the stage has been set, he has not even mentioned yet the mystery of the Eucharist. That is still to come.